How do you persuade students to continue studying at TU/e after completing their bachelor’s? That is the question four new retention officers are tasked with answering. The number of master’s students within the Beethoven departments (Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science, and Applied Physics) needs to grow, and significantly so. By 2030, there should be 1,900 additional students enrolled in the master’s programs of these departments.

One way to get there is by encouraging more students to move on from a bachelor’s to a master’s program. The ambition is to increase that number by around 10 percent each year starting in 2027. That would amount to roughly 150 to 250 students per year, says Maarten van den Dungen, who has a coordinating role in retaining bachelor’s students for Project Beethoven.

According to him, “keeping students here” is not the right way to put it. “Not all students need to stay after their bachelor’s; that is ultimately the essence of the bachelor’s–master’s system. But there are students who choose to try their luck elsewhere based on an incorrect image, wrong information, or negative experiences during the bachelor’s phase. Those are the ones we would like to retain.” Low-hanging fruit includes better informing students about which master’s programs TU/e offers and making them aware of the regional ecosystem and career opportunities.

Feeling at home

What really works, Van den Dungen argues, is making sure students feel at home. The most efficient way to do that would be to help them find love in Eindhoven, “but of course it would be a bit unethical to try to influence that,” he jokes. “Maybe if it really becomes necessary, we’ll put Valentine’s Day in the spotlight a bit more in a year or two.”

Jokes aside, the university can genuinely help students build a social life, he says. For example, by making sure they land well during the introduction period and the first hundred days afterward, and by organizing events such as Connect with my Culture.

According to Van den Dungen, there is still room for improvement on the social front, partly due to a changing student population. “Ten years ago, about 90 percent of our students were Dutch. Now we’re moving toward a fifty-fifty split at the bachelor’s level, with half of the students coming from abroad. Not all processes and systems — especially in the social domain — have fully made that transition yet.”

Housing shortage

Social integration is not the only area lagging behind. Housing remains a major problem in Eindhoven. This summer, TU/e raised the alarm, stating that the university was ‘losing’ five hundred new students due to the shortage of student rooms. “It’s a bottleneck in our growth ambitions,” Van den Dungen acknowledge and one that no retention officer can solve on their own. “But these are parallel processes. We are trying to retain as many suitable and talented students as possible, while at the same time various other projects are underway within Beethoven, the municipality, and Brainport to ensure that housing supply grows as well.”

One advantage many bachelor’s students already studying in Eindhoven have is that they likely already have accommodation. In addition, they are already integrated: “They know Dutch culture and can find their way around. That makes the chance that they will stay much higher than for someone who has just arrived from abroad and still has to see whether everything fits.”

Bachelor’s students are therefore a valuable group, and the retention officers are now focusing on them. “It will really be a matter of searching for possibilities, understanding students’ motivations and seeing which activities help. The real effects will probably only become visible in about two years. That’s why we need to get started as soon as possible.”

Decline for now at Mechanical Engineering 

While the other three Beethoven departments all saw an increase in new master’s students this year, Mechanical Engineering actually experienced a decline of about 9 percent. According to full professor Hans Kuerten, who leads educational development and student recruitment for Beethoven within the department, this is mainly due to two smaller interdepartmental master’s programs that are currently less popular. “Comparable programs elsewhere are facing the same issue.”

He expects to see the effects of the department’s efforts to increase master’s enrollment only next year. “The retention officer has only just started, and the employee who will try to increase the flow from universities of applied sciences into our program doesn’t start until January. Visits to international fairs, improved promotional materials, and holding the master’s open day on a weekend, have also only just begun, and their impact will likely only become visible from 2026 onward.”